Bouchon Racine, London: "I'm a big fan of dribbling" - restaurant review
Root Plug, 66 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BP (020 7253 3368). Starters £8.50-16.50, mains £17.50-£48, desserts £6.50-9, wines from £25.50
There are has movie critics who, along with a Martin Scorsese film, can be guaranteed to rave. There are theater critics who will be full of puppy love when they write about any Stephen Sondheim musical. It's the equivalent of the restaurant review. The only argument for me not revisiting the recently opened Bouchon Racine is that I'm a huge drooling admirer of everyone involved and all the food they serve. In other words, because I was convinced in advance that the restaurant would be really very good and because I was given absolutely right, I should not say it because I have already shown myself to be compromised , thanks to my deep experience and irresistible, impeccable good taste. Yeah, that's right.
So there you have it: Bouchon Racine is everything. It's the happy rebirth of chef Henry Harris' restaurant Racine, a once popular bistro on London's Brompton Road, which opened in 2002. Harris, who was part of Simon Hopkinson's first brigade in Bibendum, wanted , after a less fortunate run in the kitchens of being fascinated by fashion, to open a restaurant serving the kind of classic French dishes he loved. He wanted to do indecently good things with butter and cream and inner bits of the animal that too many people shy away from. His menu was a shameless celebration of the bourgeois, marinated in the best of Bordeaux, washed down just with Armagnac.
Racine, which means root, was supposed to be a neighborhood restaurant, but in 2015 there really wasn't any more neighborhood on the left. Too many people viewed property less as a home and more as an investment. Harris moved on. He brought some of his Francophile magic to a bunch of pubs and, along the way, out of concern of full disclosure, cooked the last supper for the end of my book of the same name, in a room above one of them. We ate very well that evening.
Now he teams up with Dave Strauss, another industry veteran with a knack for service and a beard that even Zeus must envy. I have many reasons to love Strauss, beyond the f is that it makes good service seem effortless. He was General Manager of the Hilarious Beast in 2014 when I wrote an excoriating review. I argued that the steaks were so expensive, "they should drive the damn animal into the restaurant and put it under the table so it can please me while I eat." Strauss replied on Twitter: "Slaughtering cows are already on their way to the restaurant." He ran Goodman and Zelman Meats before a stint in the West Country with chef Mitch Tonks.
Root Plug, 66 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BP (020 7253 3368). Starters £8.50-16.50, mains £17.50-£48, desserts £6.50-9, wines from £25.50
There are has movie critics who, along with a Martin Scorsese film, can be guaranteed to rave. There are theater critics who will be full of puppy love when they write about any Stephen Sondheim musical. It's the equivalent of the restaurant review. The only argument for me not revisiting the recently opened Bouchon Racine is that I'm a huge drooling admirer of everyone involved and all the food they serve. In other words, because I was convinced in advance that the restaurant would be really very good and because I was given absolutely right, I should not say it because I have already shown myself to be compromised , thanks to my deep experience and irresistible, impeccable good taste. Yeah, that's right.
So there you have it: Bouchon Racine is everything. It's the happy rebirth of chef Henry Harris' restaurant Racine, a once popular bistro on London's Brompton Road, which opened in 2002. Harris, who was part of Simon Hopkinson's first brigade in Bibendum, wanted , after a less fortunate run in the kitchens of being fascinated by fashion, to open a restaurant serving the kind of classic French dishes he loved. He wanted to do indecently good things with butter and cream and inner bits of the animal that too many people shy away from. His menu was a shameless celebration of the bourgeois, marinated in the best of Bordeaux, washed down just with Armagnac.
Racine, which means root, was supposed to be a neighborhood restaurant, but in 2015 there really wasn't any more neighborhood on the left. Too many people viewed property less as a home and more as an investment. Harris moved on. He brought some of his Francophile magic to a bunch of pubs and, along the way, out of concern of full disclosure, cooked the last supper for the end of my book of the same name, in a room above one of them. We ate very well that evening.
Now he teams up with Dave Strauss, another industry veteran with a knack for service and a beard that even Zeus must envy. I have many reasons to love Strauss, beyond the f is that it makes good service seem effortless. He was General Manager of the Hilarious Beast in 2014 when I wrote an excoriating review. I argued that the steaks were so expensive, "they should drive the damn animal into the restaurant and put it under the table so it can please me while I eat." Strauss replied on Twitter: "Slaughtering cows are already on their way to the restaurant." He ran Goodman and Zelman Meats before a stint in the West Country with chef Mitch Tonks.
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